Archive for Linden Lab

In a meeting earlier today, InWorldz founders Tranquillity Dexler and Elenia Llewellyn announced a significant change to the InWorldz business model — the first such change in last 5 years. InWorldz will offer “Plus” user accounts, which will provide an affordable entry point to land ownership, particularly well-suited for “lite” users and new arrivals to the virtual world. And it will be managed by the existing residents of InWorldz, earning the region managers between $18 and $48 US per month.

“Lite” Users and the Barrier to Entry

Currently, virtual worlds can be partitioned into one of two categories: full-featured commercial worlds with a real economy, and one where most users are participating entirely for free (with no monthly budget). Many users are what I would call “lite” users, going in and chatting with others, hanging out in a club or an art gallery, but not really experiencing the full virtual world experience. And this leads to the user moving on to the next interesting thing that comes along, hurting retention. A problem in both commercial and open (free) grids, but especially in the commercial worlds, is that for many users there is no mental, emotional or financial investment in that virtual world. In many cases, that investment comes in the form of customization; changing their avatar from the default, or establishing a home and customizing the contents and feel of the home.

Without that mental, emotional or financial investment, a user doesn’t really develop any roots and it’s easy for a user to just move on at the first sign of boredom. It is understood, or at least assumed, that one of the things that helps anchor a user in a virtual world is owning some virtual land there. And in InWorldz, a region costs $75 per month, which is out of the price range of many budgets. Sure the user could rent a smaller parcel from one of the many landlord users in the virtual world, but there is no direct encouragement of this. Wouldn’t it be great if a user could just check a box on the grid website, and pay a much smaller fee, and be given a plot of land of a reasonable size and with a reasonable number of prims and allow that instinct for customization to flourish? Then when they do develop roots in the virtual community, they can be directly encouraged to upgrade to a larger or better parcel managed by one of the many landlords? (Or even buy a full region for their own use?)

This is all about removing a very large barrier to entry for new and lite users. This concept is an incentive for users with a much smaller bit of disposable cash than $75 for a region, and a larger portion of the 7000+ users from the 8000+ monthly active user base who don’t spend a cent in-world, to directly participate in the economy. It lowers that barrier to entry into something they are more likely able to invest in, encouraging mental and emotional investment in the grid and the people of the grid.

SL Premium and Linden Homes

On the surface, there are similarities with the approach that Linden Lab tried in SL: Linden Homes. While I believe the SL premium accounts were relatively successful, and provide the necessary boost of income to Linden Lab, I believe that Linden Homes is generally considered to have been a failed experiment — a direct result of a useless and fairly horrible program. Offering the user a 512 sqm parcel with 117 prims to be “creative” with is just bound to be problematic. It mostly sends the wrong message: that a small investment in that grid is useless, directly revealing how prims are heavily metered and costly in Second Life, and that you will probably never be happy with the restrictions placed on your investment. The homes themselves were crowded and not particularly enticing.

Offering a similar but better program in InWorldz helps to highlight one of InWorldz strengths: the much more affordable land parcels, that come with several times more prims to be creative with or to use to customize your home environment.

InWorldz “Plus” Users

The SL idea itself wasn’t a bad one; it was just implemented very poorly. InWorldz will do Plus user accounts better. For one thing, the land parcels themselves will be 2048 sqm, which is four times the size of the SL parcels. And within that parcel, the Plus user will have 1406 prims, or twelve times the number of prims an SL premium account gets. A user will actually be able to really do something with an InWorldz Plus account. And while a 64K sqm region could fit 32 such parcels, in InWorldz, the Plus user regions will have only 24 such parcels, leaving 25% of the region for shared land, parks, and other beautification features.

And the cost? In SL the cost is $9.95 per month; the InWorldz cost is only $5.95 per month, something that most people can afford once per month. It’s a much lower barrier to entry, and provides that mental, emotional and financial investment in the grid, owning land, having a home, and directly participating in the economy. It is a direct appeal to those thousands of “lite” users who see the much bigger investments as a barrier.

InWorldz will also offer a way for LSL scripts to identify whether a user is a Plus user or not (see the new iwIsPlusUser LSL script function). This will allow store owners and others to potentially offer perks or discounts to Plus users.

Even users with full private regions may wish to become Plus users. If their home is located in an isolated (unconnected) region, and the regions with the Plus user parcels are connected to the mainland, or I’z Straits and I’z Ocean regions, full region owners might treat their Plus land parcel as a kind of cottage, in a region with a dock for their boat, or perhaps an airstrip for flying. This provides the benefit of privacy and control with no neighbors for their home (full region), but an affordable “getaway” spot for a vacation cottage connected to the mainland waterways for recreation.

Retention: Dropping Anchor

It’s not for everyone, but it’s likely of significant interest to new users, and “lite” users, which is the huge majority of InWorldz residents. InWorldz needs to do something to encourage these residents to dip their toe and test the waters. InWorldz needs to get those users to drop anchor and adopt the grid as their virtual home. Providing very affordable land, that is large enough and capable enough to actually be used effectively is a way to encourage that dropping of the anchor, and the retention of those users.

Resident-Managed Plus Regions

The Plus user regions will be managed by existing residents. As Tranquillity Dexler outlined, “Each Plus region will have a land manager. This land manager must be an established InWorldz resident and land owner. They must have been on InWorldz for at least 6 months, and owned land for at least 3 months to gain access to managing a Plus region.”

The managers will not own the region, they will manage it on behalf of InWorldz. And in exchange for this, once 9 of the 24 parcels are occupied, they will receive $2 per occupant. This is just above one third of the funds from the Plus account, just for managing the region and trying to keep your Plus residents happy within the region. This means there is no reward — but also no cost — at first, but that payment will be between $18 and $48 US to the resident for managing a Plus user region, so directly in the hands of the InWorldz residents.

A Better SL?

To date, the model has been to offer something similar and familiar to SL residents, but to do it better than LL, with fewer restrictions, and fewer obstacles. To enable residents to accomplish what they wanted to do in SL, but could not, for reasons of business or SL grid management failures. This is yet another step to offer something familiar, yet different (and better).

There are residents who are so tainted by the Linden handling of premium accounts that they fear any attempt to offer these in InWorldz. But it is time to shake things up a bit, in an attempt to strengthen InWorldz and ensure longer-term success. Having more users drop anchor and create their own modest home adds to the number of regions, helping InWorldz, provides revenue to the users managing the regions, and may push those lite users past that “not spending a cent on virtual worlds” problem to the point where they start contributing to the economy. If you own a store or a club in InWorldz, this is exactly the kind of thing we need to do to try to jump-start resident retention and economic participation and help them to add to the world.

Update: Another blogger has shared her thoughts on this plan, from the perspective of an InWorldz (and former SL) resident. It’s a good read. See this link for the article.

I entered SL near the end of 2006 and by the middle of 2007 I found myself and my partner at the time not only TPing home at the end of the day, but also hopping into bed when it was time to sleep in RL, and not logging out. When we slept in RL, we slept in SL. We were online 24 hours a day. There were often direct parallels between RL and our virtual selves.

The feeling of walking back to your computer in the morning when you woke, and seeing yourself still sleeping in-world, was very comforting. Warm fuzzies.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t particularly realistic or practical. If you were online 24 hours a day, and near the end of your first year of SL, you had quite a few friends (2007 was a VERY good year in SL) and many, like yourself, were still fairly new at it. You would end up confusing and frustrating them with your lack of response to IMs, etc. If you marked yourself offline to avoid that, you might find someone accusing you of “hiding” your online status from friends. But the worth part was if you woke the next day to find you had lost your connection, or your partner had, and when you do get to see yourself in-world, you find the bed’s now-empty ball has been taken by a newbie with an over-sized freenis. Eventually it was more trouble than positive so later in 2007, we both stopped doing that. However, I still have never lost the warm fuzzies you get when you log in and see a last-logoff pic of a nice goodbye. Especially if your partner is in the last logoff pic as well. It continues your new day from where the old one left off.

Canary mentioned one of my two favourite song-writing idols, Burt Bacharach (Jimmy Webb being the other). Bacharach’s song may take artistic license with a house not being a house without someone to share it with, but I will say the general sentiment is probably true in that it sure makes a home more of a home if you do have someone else in it. I have a place to genuinely call home in RL now, although it’s just me there. Still, that means there’s room for improvement.

I went to InWorldz because SL had become too expensive to remain creative there. Every single upload cost L$. Every prim counted. I was attracted by InWorldz’ higher limits and lower costs: 45,000 prims, at one quarter the SL cost, and never any upload fees. They were very friendly and supportive of content creators. My plan was to continue in SL as normal, but use InWorldz to make the home that I wanted in SL. A whole region to myself, 75% off. I could even disable Public Access if I wanted and never suffer the evil freenis ever again, because it was mine, all mine. And I could build and build and never have to think about prim limits. I could even build that dream home on the ground and have plenty of prims to build a city at 3000m in the sky. I could take 3 regions from SL and stack them in one InWorldz region. And at a cost of 75% off.

I still had a Premium account in SL, and 512 sqm parcel for my SL Exchange / Marketplace box. My plan was to do everything in SL, including TPing home to that small parcel, then log into InWorldz to experience an improved home like before bed time. Very much like what Canary described, but with the grids flipped.

That soon changed when more and more events started happening in InWorldz, and soon my friends list was far longer there than in SL. Also, as a software developer, I wanted to contribute and volunteered my bugfixing there for about 18 months before they grew large enough to actually hire me full-time. Now it’s a fairly high-pressure job (there’s only a few staff still, and lots and lots of users), but it is what I call my “dream job”. The founders there have the 2006 SL attitude: to enable everyone to live their dreams. It is really what I miss from the good years in SL. And in addition to that, they want to help make the world a better place. Using InWorldz to help kids in Africa, using it to help encourage users to exercise, use it to help support arts and charities, and to just plain encourage people to be creative and live their dreams. There are a lot of good people there. So I have found even more than a Home.

I definitely agree with what I think Canary’s article says or implies: a home is more than just a Home, and a Home can be a real home. I need to spend more time in mine!

Over on Inara Pey’s blog posting on region crossings by vehicles, Pussycat Catnip added a comment that asked the question:

Are there really Open Sims that -lack- this ability? I’d just assumed this was as standard as the ability to rez-in your own avatar… (ie: logging in).

I started to post a reply there, but after seeing the length, I did not want to hijack that blog posting in any way. So here is my answer here:

No, to the best of my knowledge, all OpenSim grids have lacked this ability until now, unless you include InWorldz. It’s a very significant thing, and was in also a big accomplishment by Linden Lab when they provided this for MONO scripts in Second Life. But it’s not really anything to do with physics, or vehicles. It’s about transitioning a running script (in anything) from one region to another. The explanation is a bit long; my apologies.

The Script Continuation Problem

When SL went with the .NET/MONO runtime environment, they forego the ability to control scripts very closely, since the runtime environment was developed by a third party. But during a region hand-off, they need complete control. They need to be able to stop scripts running in one virtual runtime, transmit them to another region, and load them in an object on that region, and not restart the scripts, but rather continue them from where they left off. So it’s just not a matter of re-rezzing a new copy of the same thing on another region; it must restore a copy of that object with the scripts running in the same context as they were when the object hit the region border. All the active data, the current state of the script’s execution contents, must be restore and continued from where it left off. For example, before this, in OpenSim, scripts were restarted (from their beginning, losing their current context) after a TP or region crossing. InWorldz achieved this continuation of scripts with the introduction of the Phlox script engine last summer, but it was not possible in OpenSim until now.

Linden Lab’s Solution

When Linden Lab implemented this before any of the alternative grids, there was no ability to get this execution context from the third-party runtime environment (MONO). So Linden Lab developers effectively had to become MONO developers, and provide significant hacks, er, I mean extensions, to the MONO project. Which then effectively meant they were running their own variant of MONO. (I’m not aware of how extensive or localized the changes were from the standard tree.) It was a lot of hard work, but they eventually provided the hooks in MONO that they needed to pause running code (MONO scripts compile to native code), and to serialize the data into a stream that could them be fed to the next region, deserialized, and reapplied to a copy of the object on the other region. That was a lot of work and I’m sure when they started, they probably weren’t really sure to what degree their success would be.

InWorldz’ Solution

When InWorldz chose to attack this problem about a year ago, they chose a completely different path. They chose to create their own Phlox Script Engine runtime environment as a virtual machine, providing whatever hooks were needed as an inherent part of the design of that virtual machine. Then compile LSL (or any language desired) into the intermediate p-code that their own virtual machine understood. Not only does this keep control of the runtime environment for scripts within the InWorldz development project, but it allows much easier extensions in the future, much MUCH better processor consumption and memory management, and complete control of scripts.

One of the planned side-effects of this Phlox design is direct control of hand-offs between regions. These can be done *so* efficiently that some naysayers actually complain that videos of crossings (here and here) must have been doctored, or faked in some way. It’s that good. Vehicles are just one example of script crossings. Physics really doesn’t play into this much. If you can walk across regions, you’ve performed complex crossings of physical objects. The tricky part is having the scripts continue where they left off, uninterrupted, and this includes vehicle scripts (and a lot more).

Avination and OpenSim Milestone

This is why I give credit to Avination for their recent success in the major work item of script state persistence across region crossings. The vehicle part of it isn’t really the big deal here. Having true continuation of active scripts on the other side is a Big Deal. This is also a key part of why I found the “first” claim by Avination to be so outrageous; InWorldz has had vehicle crossings since the Phlox runtime environment came online last summer. Even in terms of physical vehicle crossings, InWorldz has had ODE physics (same as other OpenSim grids) since before InWorldz was founded. However due to its ability to cause region crashes, it has been disabled for about a year (out of InWorldz’ 3 year history). If InWorldz simply turned physical objects back on, physical vehicle crossings would have been possible since the introduction of Phlox; the hard part, and the part Avination just completed, was the persistence of the scripts across the crossings, and that was fully functional and available grid-wide in InWorldz last summer.

However, since the Linden Lab proprietary implementation, another third party developer has provided an implementation of continuations in MONO, which has been available since MONO 2.6. This provides the context save/restore needed, and Avination has successfully applied that to the OpenSim runtime. That’s great news for MONO-based script engines in OpenSim.

Thinking Ahead

In the long run, I see moving away from MONO as the best (and perhaps the only) way to tame processor and memory use and provide complete control of the runtime environment. Phlox will provide that total control, which means more features. Things like much easier support for new languages, an LSL debugger that can be built-in to the viewers to allow single-stepping through LSL code and examination of variables at each stage, easier control over scripts CPU and memory usage, and many other secondary benefits, such as no need to try to limit script cost artificially and blame script authors for hurting sim performance.

But the bottom line here is that continuing a script in a new region, running on a completely different machine (IP address) is a Big Deal. Physical objects, a vehicles, not so much, but persisting those scripts, hell yes. It’s a major accomplishment, and now OpenSim has it too.

This is just a short note to make two points. First, you never know what Twitter will being to you each day. Second, Rod Humble may be bringing hope to Second Life.

An interesting exchange on Twitter today, for both residents of Second Life and InWorldz: In a discussion about the new “Basic” viewer for Second Life, Lady Sakai threw out a plug for mentors programs. Then the truly surprising answer came from Mr. Humble:

rodvik: @LadySakai @InaraPey She did 🙂 Answer is yes. But we need to iterate fast on new user experience, while not messing with current..rodvik: @LadySakai @InaraPey ..customers. Essentially Basic allows us to make big changes without breaking experienced customers enjoyment.

LadySakai: @rodvik @InaraPey Good Luck on that one Rodvik. May I recomend mentors? They are amazing in InWorldz. Makes ppl feel right at home

rodvik: @LadySakai @InaraPey Thanks, I will go look see how it works.

If I understood that correctly, that’s Rod Humble (Linden Lab CEO) talking about coming to InWorldz to check out the mentor program.

The mentor program? (A program that Linden Lab also had originally, but canceled?)

Wow, interesting day.

I find it amazingly positive that Mr. Humble would want to learn more about what the mentors are doing, especially on another grid. It’s that kind of to-hell-with-the-fact-it’s-on-an-alternative-grid thing that gives me hope for Second Life. He’s doing what is best for Second Life and the residents there, learning what others are doing, how well that is working, why it’s working in InWorldz but had problems in SL. I think that even wanting to learn more about that is a wonderful thing. We’ve needed that kind of attitude in Second Life for some time.